Don't put any money into socket-939 components in this decade. Upgrading your graphics card to a Radeon HD7770 is fine. If you're still not happy with game performance at 1080p with the new graphics card, that would be the time to upgrade your CPU and motherboard to LGA1155.

Then again, a GPU upgrade would carry over to a new system since it's all PCI-express. Getting a 7770 would not be wasted money as long as a CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade was close behind. Even a Pentium G850 and H77 setup would absolutely trounce the 939 getup and use less power to boot. If you can scrape together $200 extra bucks, that's what I'd be looking at.

edit: didn't see page 2, my bad. Definitely a good choice.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.

My athlon 64x2 / 6850 spare sytem is fully capable of playing games like Rage, UT3, and SupCom. Yeah, Rage. I'm giving factual advice directly based from experience, not biased opinion based on nothing or outdated internet benchmarks using old cards. I've also seen several opteron 180 listings on ebay for under $30 plus free shipping, which is a pretty good deal if the cpu really was a problem. You could easily upgrade the card now, then move it to your new system when you upgrade, instead of waiting until the end of the year. Then again nvidia could have the 650 out by then too. If you don't mind waiting, wait. If not, upgrade. The whole X2 bashfest here is a joke best ignored. The X2 doesn't perform like a 486 regardless of what some people say, nor have games progressed so far as to need more than the 2 cores on the X2. The videocard will be the biggest performance leap, not the cpu.

l33t-g4m3r wrote:The whole X2 bashfest here is a joke best ignored. The X2 doesn't perform like a 486 regardless of what some people say, nor have games progressed so far as to need more than the 2 cores on the X2. The videocard will be the biggest performance leap, not the cpu

You're only partially correct. Nobody said a 64x2 couldn't game, in fact there are many games that don't care what CPU youre running becausse they are hugely GPU controlled, like BF3, DiRT3, etc. But as you can see from both of those links, games that are CPU bound (like Skyrim, Starcraft II, etc) show that you can get 2x or better of frame rates by jumping from an Athlon x2 to a quad-core Sandy/Ivy Bridge processor and 50+% increase with a dual-core Sandy Bridge. It all comes down to what games you play.No doubt a graphics card upgrade now will provide some benefit and be able carry over to the new rig at Christmas. But if the OP is going to wait till Christmas for a system overhall, the deals on GPUs at that time will probably be better. That's only 3.5 months or so to wait...maybe Nvidia will have their 660 out by that time to compete with the 7850 and drive prices down further.

I also splurged and paid $26 for a 2 year instant in-store replacement warranty. I know most of the time this is a waste of money, you can RMA the parts yourself and you get extended warranties with credit card purchases, but I bought it mostly for convenience and piece of mind. Given the cost of the parts, $26 seemed a reasonable price for this.

The shop puts the board, cpu, and memory together and does a basic function test for free when you buy all three parts together, so that simplified things for me

I swapped in the new parts over the weekend, and now Battlefield 3 runs very well, albeit on lower settings. I was able to run on ultra, but the frame rate was a bit choppy with my old 8800 GT. Still, I had a lot of fun and am very happy to run it. I stuck with playing 64 player team death match on foot, and enjoyed the novelty of actually seeing who was shooting me and who I was shooting at

Using the Windows 7 Sysprep tool, I was able to put the system in out-of-box mode prior to swapping the hardware. This saved me the trouble of doing an OS wipe and program reinstallation. I still backed up my user profiles and my other critical files. I'll probably do an OS wipe later, but I just wanted to worry the hardware this time.

I was able to get an old case, power supply, DVD burner, and video card from my work. I combined the above components with my old motherboard, CPU, RAM, and my old IDE drives (now unusable without an adapter with my new board) into a backup/spare machine. I even had an old XP installation on one of the IDE drives, and with a video card driver update and installation of the driver for the onboard sound driver, I had a machine read to go

I know Piledriver is coming, but the upgrade had to come now, and within a $250 budget. Also, the FX-4320 specs wise doesn't look much better then the 4170, and even if the FX-8350 were available today, I doubt it would be in my budget. Budget also precluded me getting a quad-core intel chip, as the least expensive quad core is is $179.99 for just the chip! I also thought about getting an FM2 processor, but the onboard video is still inferior to my GPU, and the processor and full atx motherboard were both more expensive with a slower clock speed. I could have gotten a 990 board, but that would again be more money, and I'm not planning on crossfiring/sliing in the near future (are those word? you know what i mean )

To get back to the original point of this thread, I probably will still perform a graphics upgrade at some point in the future. I'm thinking I'll see what the price of a Geforce 650 TI or Radeon 7770 are fetching around boxing day. Actually, I can think about a 7850 or 660 if the price is right, now that I know I have a 550 watt power supply

Thanks again everyone for your help and advice in my upgrade odyssey. As this thread has changed from a video card upgrade, if an admin feels it should be moved to a different section of the forum, please feel free to do so. Thanks again!

Even though myth busters proved you can polish a turd it's just not worth it in your case. I am currently able to play BF3 on a 329$ i3 2120 with 6gb 1333 mem a 1 tb hd with a 300 watt psu, it's a refurbished gateway I added a gddr5 7750 gpu to. I have to run on medium settings but I get 50-70fps. If you live near a Microcenter I would chech out the factory refurbs. For another 100$ you can get a i5 3.0ghz quad core with 3.3 turbo speed for 439$ and add a 7770 to it. I own 2gateway/acer refurbs and not a problem at all. People might try to scare you away from them but you cannot beat what you get for the$. Both my refurbs have been running 24/7 for around 6 months and not a hiccup from either. They both are sporting i3 2120s and the 229$ slim one I put a LP asus 6570 running at 800 core only has a 220 watt psu. The fat towers 7750 is Oced to 1100 core and like 1300 mem when gaming.

I would just like to ask the earlier posters in this thread to look what you have done. This thread was originally about helping someone upgrade a terribly outdated video card for BF3, and instead of recommending a video card, you people completely derailed this thread into system building. Consequently, the OP has went system building instead of upgrading his video card, and not only that he went with a FX-4170 Zambezi instead of a A10-5800K Trinity or FX-6300 Vishera, and still does not have a new video card. This likely would have worked out a lot better the other way around. Good job people.

Last edited by l33t-g4m3r on Sun Oct 28, 2012 9:49 am, edited 2 times in total.

l33t-g4m3r wrote:I would just like to ask the earlier posters in this thread to look what you have done.

JustAnEngineer wrote:Don't put any money into socket-939 components in this decade. Upgrading your graphics card to a Radeon HD7770 is fine. If you're still not happy with game performance at 1080p with the new graphics card, that would be the time to upgrade your CPU and motherboard to LGA1155.

l33t-g4m3r wrote:I would just like to ask the earlier posters in this thread to look what you have done.

JustAnEngineer wrote:Don't put any money into socket-939 components in this decade. Upgrading your graphics card to a Radeon HD7770 is fine. If you're still not happy with game performance at 1080p with the new graphics card, that would be the time to upgrade your CPU and motherboard to LGA1155.

I'd still say the same.

Well, that's along the same lines of what I was trying to get across, but what's done is done. Not that this is a total catastrophe as the cpu is acceptable, but it could have gone better. At least there are better options available for a card now, so hopefully the OP mulls that over.

A system upgrade is really what needed to happen. This just goes to show that you can only make so many suggestions and point the OP at so many factual arguments. But in the end, they are the ones that have to make the decision and purchase the components. I think the FX-4170 choice was okay. Sure, the upgrade order got flip-flopped, but at least the GPU is still scheduled for the holidays.

DPete27 wrote:A system upgrade is really what needed to happen. This just goes to show that you can only make so many suggestions and point the OP at so many factual arguments. But in the end, they are the ones that have to make the decision and purchase the components. I think the FX-4170 choice was okay. Sure, the upgrade order got flip-flopped, but at least the GPU is still scheduled for the holidays.

It'll be fine with a few screws tightened- two Bulldozer modules with decent cooling will fail before overheating in any scenario. Just don't expect the world of it .

Hey, you're preaching the choir. I was suggesting a low cost Intel Pentium build from the beginning so there would still be funds for the GPU upgrade. Later, an SB or IVB i5 could have been dropped in. Nobody listens to me While the FX consumes much more power and generates more heat, you do have more "cores" than a dual-core Pentium which will be better for things other than games. And gaming performance isn't bad, just not the best.

I just wanted to share with the world, since this is one of the forum posts I came across that contained the information I was looking for. I have an Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 and I was tired of using my PCI Express v1.0 video card and was wondering if the nVidia Geforce GT 640 was compatible since it was a v3.0 card. It turns out it works with no problems at all.

Games well at 1080p for the money,BF3 50-70fps on medium settings...overclocked from a factory 800mhz core to 1100mhz....the memory from 1125 to 1335.With a i3 2120 i just 3dmark 11 benched it after upgrading to the latest drivers about 5 days ago and scored over 3300points. I was impressed since i do not ever remember the card benching higher then 2900+ at my previously listed overclocked speeds. Also considering it uses only the pciE bus for power also!! no extra PCIe power connector needed.I also run the card stock at all times unless i am GAMING...so 99% of the time its stock clocked. I also use the HIS iturbo overclocking software on it. It allows you up to 20% increase in board power along with increasing the vcore voltage. If i recall correctly sapphires trix program limited my overclock.....or it helped me get a better overclock on my asus 6570 low profile card. I cannot recall...but i am using trix with the 6570 and its overclocked a wee bit.

BTW its the free standard 3dmark test no ext test.

My 560ti sli rig scores about 10400 but that has a 2600k at almost 4700mhz and the EVGA superclocked 560tis are overclocked to 1015mhz cores and 2400 mem from 900 factory care and 2100 mem. Note they both run at 975mhz cores and 2400mhz mem 24/7 at stock volts. I have to up the core power a little bit to get them stable at 1015mhz. I just stumbled on this old score i shared with a friend on facebook back in jan of this year, at the time my 3dmark epeen was the 3rd largest..my score is on the left side and my memory is running at 1600mhz it allways says its at 1333 for some reason. http://www.3dmark.com/compare/3dm11/247 ... 11/2101424

l33t-g4m3r wrote:I would just like to ask the earlier posters in this thread to look what you have done. This thread was originally about helping someone upgrade a terribly outdated video card for BF3, and instead of recommending a video card, you people completely derailed this thread into system building. Consequently, the OP has went system building instead of upgrading his video card, and not only that he went with a FX-4170 Zambezi instead of a A10-5800K Trinity or FX-6300 Vishera, and still does not have a new video card. This likely would have worked out a lot better the other way around. Good job people.

I know I could have done better if I upgraded later, but I had a limited window and budget within which to upgrade, and I'm happy with what I got. I could have gone with the APU, but the motherboard available at the time was a fair bit more expensive, and I chose the higher clock speed of the older Fx-4170 over the A10-5800k; plus my research indicated my 8800 gt was superior to the 6670-class graphics of the APU. I could not wait for the Piledrivers to come out; I definitely would have gone with one of them if I could have waited. When your wife says yes to an upgrade as of right now, you say yes dear and thank her; you do not ask to wait, unless you want to lose your upgrade, and possibly your head I figure I can upgrade the CPU at a later date when needed.

Right now, I can play with Battlefield 3 at a medium settings at 1680x1024 , with no AA or AF (which I don't really use anyways). I've only noticed a little chop when inside a warehouse on a 64 player map in Close Quarters, with many players on screen among girders, rails, and a lot other surface heavy objects. Since I wouldn't have been able to see any of the characters with my old CPU/board/RAM, I consider the upgrade over a graphics card well worth it. I don't think a mere graphics upgrade would have done the trick; I was below the minimum requirements, and the engine didn't have the required horsepower to do generate the character models.

Thanks again for all the advise! Kind of neat to see the thread live on after I upgraded.

Last edited by Ustauk on Tue Nov 20, 2012 8:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

zeta wrote:I just wanted to share with the world, since this is one of the forum posts I came across that contained the information I was looking for. I have an Asrock 939Dual-SATA2 and I was tired of using my PCI Express v1.0 video card and was wondering if the nVidia Geforce GT 640 was compatible since it was a v3.0 card. It turns out it works with no problems at all.

Glad to see you found the post helpful. Good luck with the card, if you're happy with it, or if you upgrade to a 7750 or 7770 later.

One more question in regards to a future graphics update:When I put in the new CPU/motherboard/RAM, I put Windows 7 in out out of box mode before doing the swap, which worked fine. In the case of an upgrade to either an Nvidia card, or an AMD card, would uninstalling the old video card drivers be enough, or should I again put the system in out-of-box-mode to ensure a clean driver installation? Thanks!

As far as I know, if you're going from an Nvidia GPU to AMD, you just need to uninstall the graphics drivers first. You don't need to uninstall drivers if you're sticking with the same brand (AMD / Nvidia). Of course it wouldn't hurt to uninstall the drivers with any GPU upgrade. No need to reformat your computer though.

As DPete27 says, you should definitely uninstall if switching vendors. If I had to guess, however, Windows probably just unloads the drivers as soon as it detects the device isn't installed any more so it shouldn't have too many ramifications if you forget to. More than likely, the control panel will complain it can't find the driver or card anymore and close itself.

If using the same vendor and assuming your drivers are the same package as required by the new card, you may be able to get away with not uninstalling the drivers first. However, I've actually run into issues when upgrading a pair of 7950s to 7970s without reinstalling them. I ended up just doing an in-place reinstall. Since you're going from an 8800GT to something far newer, I'd recommend uninstalling first even if you stick with nVidia.

No need to reformat or do anything special to Windows - you typically only need to do that when switching motherboards.

I'm thinking of grabbing a Zotac Geforce 650 TI video card from my local supplier for $115 (American and Canadian dollar is about the same right now). I missed a $100 yesterday on a HIS Radeon 7770, but I could also get that fro $120. Is either card a worthwhile upgrade to an 8800 gt? I'm limited to around the $100 mark for my card budget. Are there any more budget cards on the horizon, like the GTX 655? Does anyone expect prices to drop further by Boxing Day (day after Chrismas) which is usually better then Black Friday for sales up here in Canada)? Thanks!

See this for GTX650 numbers and compare that to the numbers in this article. Pay close attention to the results for the GT250 as it is (more or less) the same as an 8800GT only somewhat faster. You'll see that the GT250 is pretty outmatched in every respect and you should expect the 8800GT to do even worse.

See this for GTX650 numbers and compare that to the numbers in this article. Pay close attention to the results for the GT250 as it is (more or less) the same as an 8800GT only somewhat faster. You'll see that the GT250 is pretty outmatched in every respect and you should expect the 8800GT to do even worse.

Thanks, I've decided to pull the trigger on the 650 ti. My wife says now or you have to wait five years, so now it is The 8800 gt has lasted me five years, and I hope I get a similar life span from this card. I'm only running at 1680x1050, so I'm hoping between my upgrade to the fx-4170 and the 650 ti I should be able to run the Xbox 720 class games that will start to appear.

Thanks again for all the help everyone. Thanks to your advice, I have an almost-new PC. My processor, motherboard, and RAM are a month old, my video card will be bought today, and my primary hard drive is about a year old. My power supply is five years old, but its a Corsair 550 Watt, and I'm hoping it will keep running for many years to come :knock on wood: . And I still like my old Thermaltake Tsunami case. Thanks again everyone for the new PC!

Airmantharp wrote:Looks good! Put some screws on that FX, should be able to complement the GT650 fairly well.

I installed the Geforce GTX 650 TI on Friday, and its working well. My 3dMark Vantage 3d score increased three fold from the 8800 gt. I'm also curretly getting 4.6 ghz from the 4170; I'm regretting using the retail heat sink now, but I'm happy I was able to get a boost

At 1680x1050, the Skyrim settings checker bumped everything to high, and it seems to be working quite well. I've uped the settings of Battlefield 3 to Ultra, and notice a wee bit of slowdown rarely, but it is still very playable. I suspect for most games it would work at 1080p resolution quite well, so I'd recommend this card for those looking for a good card at a moderate resolution with a single monitor. I don't know about $150, but I think at $115 this was an excellent value. I suspect the price well drop again following Christmas.